Conscience appeased, she ate a hearty supper of stew and canned corn, followed by blackberries and evaporated milk. She didn’t even burp. Must be that fresh country air. The battered paperbacks on the shelves in the bedroom were mostly old Hardy boys and ancient thrillers. But she located Aunt Marlene’s stash of Nora Roberts and picked a paperback at random.
With the windows and doors shut it was cozy in the cabin. A day of emotional turmoil had left her pleasantly tired. She would turn in early and get a good night’s sleep, and hope that she would be spared the traditional shivaree hullabaloo outside the cabin. Should she sleep in her clothes? Just her underwear with her clothes close by – in case her relatives returned to disrupt her wedded bliss.
She crawled into bed with her book and the lantern on the window edge. Then she remembered the other damned lantern for Patrick and had to go scuttling across to the window in her panties to set it in place. It wasn’t long before she was nodding. The book thumped to the floor. She turned off the lantern and snuggled down to sleep.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The map he had been handed was inscrutable. There was no indication of north or any other direction. After studying its smudged lines, Patrick deduced that the wavy line that ran from what he took to be the top of the page to the bottom was the river he could hear but not see. His clue was a small, irregular square that had been labeled huNtiNg cabeN by some functional illiterate.
There was a route marked through what might be trees, but Patrick distrusted it. For one thing, it was not to scale, so what might have seemed logical and obvious markers to the mapmaker would probably be so many red herrings to him.
The sun was lower now than it had been. He glanced at his watch, fiddled with some buttons. Sunset would not be until 9:43. Here in the woods it would be growing dark by eight. But how hard could it be for a fellow who had been playing military games his whole life to find a cabin on a mountainside? At least no one would be shooting at him today. He hoped.
Heather was undoubtedly anxiously awaiting him to rescue her from whatever dark, dank and dirty hovel the Duprés used as their hunting camp. Unless she decided to walk out on her own. She didn’t have the best judgment in the world. He only prayed that she actually was alone.
Her Uncle Bobby’s plan to marry her off to his brother Eldon didn’t seem less sketchy here in the deep, dark woods with chipmunks and jumping mice ferreting around in the leaf litter. Just how badly did that disgusting old reprobate want to marry Heather? Was it just the money? His money? Or was delectable little Heather the real draw?
He found the river by following his ears. It ran clear yet faintly tinted with brown. Smelled clean. The color was probably geologic, or decaying plant matter. It was flowing briskly. He stuck in a bare branch and soaked his sleeve to the elbow. Too deep for him to wade in. He figured his best bet for arriving at the cabin was to follow the stream bank until he came across it.
Pursued by the clamorous calls of crows and jays, he set off uphill. It was hard going. He was hardly dressed for a hike. His khakis were okay, his shirt too damned tight. The real bitch was the damned loafers.
When Lenny and Zeke had hauled him off to the rectory to face the Duprés he had gone as is. There was something undignified and disrespectful about being married without socks. But then Heather probably never imagined she would say her vows in stained jeans and a man’s shirt.
The terrain got rougher. Shift on a stick. There was no path to speak of. Just gravelly banks broken by stretches of berry bushes. Well-harvested berry bushes. With bear scat and deer scat to show who was doing the harvesting. This reminder that Heather was alone and defenseless in woods filled with predators made him pick up his pace.
He tripped on roots. His shoes kept coming off. He lost part of his big toenail when the rocks that had seized his loafer rolled over and smashed his toe. And then the riverbank vanished. A great waterfall cascaded over a jumble of broken rocks.
On the other side of the river he spotted the mossy roof of a little tumbledown log cabin peeping through the trees. Not far now. He scrambled along as best he could. The cabin dropped out of sight. He doubled back. The stream had become a river. A river with no ford.
He fell face-first. Branches snatched at his shirt. Fabric ripped. Blood dripped from his arm. His nose hurt. One foot located a mud puddle and when he put his shoe back on, he squished. His knee throbbed. This hike was utter foolishness.
He recalled how surefooted he had been frolicking with Heather in the river that day. How easy the river – likely this river – had been to navigate. Not that he wasn’t better off ignoring his beast. Hoping to see the cabin, he levered himself onto a moss-covered rock.
It was there. Dark and unwelcoming in the twilight. No smoke at the chimney. No light at the window. Bushes growing right up against the walls. Zeke’s description of the desolate raccoon palace he had encountered on his New Year’s journey up the mountain to Jenna’s cabin came back to him. Surely, those idiot Duprés had not stuck his Heather in any such place? Not when she was clearly unwell?
He had to get across that river and rescue her. He would have to take bear and see if he could save his bride before she picked up plague or Lyme disease. He folded what was left of his clothes, tucked his watch in the driest of his ruined loafers and stuck them under some rocks in the vain hope that he would be able to wear them again.
He was going to look like a prize fool trotting bare-assed into French Town. But he suspected that making an ass of himself was part of the plan. Nothing he had ever heard of the hillbilly custom of shivaree had led him to believe it was anything other than the most ill-conceived of practical jokes.
His shift was a tad easier this time. And a touch faster. He hurt a lot less. His banged-up knee stopped aching at once. He could smell again. The dim light was now sufficient to see by. There were trout in that river. He was suddenly hungry. Ravenous.
But his goal was that cabin. Heather would be scared and, if she still had not eaten, weak. He bounded into the water and swam and scrambled across the rocks and up the waterfall until he reached the spot beside the little rise on which the cabin had been built.
Up close it was even more decrepit. The roof was green – except where it was gone. He peered in the broken windows. Sniffed. No one had been here in a long time. No Duprés. No Heather. Where the hell was his mate?
He headed back to the river. His plan was still sound. He would follow the river until he got to the Dupré camp. He could make good time in bear.
* * *
The sun woke her. It was slanting in over the tops of the trees and bathing the interior of the little cabin in golden light. Had to be nearly noon. Otherwise it would still be dim inside the cabin. She stretched, feeling refreshed by her night’s sleep for the first time since she had discovered she was pregnant.
She had to hustle to the lean-to before she could put her clothes on, but at least she hadn’t had to go three or four times during the night. Things were looking up. Clearly the Ridge agreed with her constitution.
There was no sign of her husband. But she hadn’t expected there to be. Patrick was likely back at the French Town Inn bawling someone out. Not her problem. Her spirits rose.
There wasn’t much left of last night’s stew. But what there was, together with the remains of the blackberries, made a good breakfast. She whistled while she made the bed and straightened up a bit. There wasn’t anything she fancied for lunch amongst the canned goods. With a little ingenuity, she thought she could rig some sort of fish trap. There were steelheads in the river that made good eating. And she could pick more blackberries.
Sooner or later, somebody would make the trek up to the camp to fetch her. But in the meantime, she was going to enjoy herself. It was the first holiday she could remember having since she had left high school.
Her first couple of attempts to put her fish trap in the river left her soaking and muddy. Given that she had no clean clothes and hadn’t had a bath in two days,
she figured she might as well get properly wet and clean up as best she could. The mud on her jeans washed right off. She removed her shirt and pounded it on a rock.
She would walk back to the cabin in just her bra and panties. There was no one to see except the noisy blue jays and maybe a chipmunk or two. She could come back later and check to see if she had caught any fish. Meantime, she would dry faster if she filled up her bowl with blackberries out in the sunshine.
She left her jeans hanging on a sunlit branch with her socks and her shirt when she went inside. They might take a while to dry, but she had her book and she could always wrap up in one of the sheets if she was cold here in the shaded cabin. She curled up snugly on the bed and lost herself in Nora’s romance. She didn’t even notice when her eyes closed.
* * *
Who would’ve thought there were so many rundown log cabins on either side of the river? It made sense, of course it did. If you were going to hunt, the river was where the animals were. And if you were going to spend a few days out in the woods, a sensible man would want to be close to his water supply.
But he hadn’t thought. He had spent the entire night, right through to dawn, despairingly checking cabin after cabin. Even in bear it was hard work. The river was not icy – it was too late in the summer for ice. But it was clearly fed by the snowmelt high up in the Cascades. It was cold enough that he felt chilled through to his marrow. And still he had not found the Dupré camp.
He had stopped to breakfast on steelheads. Fortunately, they were plentiful. And easily recognizable. It wasn’t illegal for bears to eat bull trout, but he wasn’t a real bear, and he knew better. Although a bellyful of fish made you less hungry, it didn’t make you less tired or less anxious.
He wasn’t worried that he would run out of steam. After Syria, he had a pretty good idea of how much stamina he had. And he seemed to have more energy in bear anyway. But he was worried about Heather.
She would be scared, miserable and hungry. Which wouldn’t be good for the babies. She would be wondering where in blazes he had gotten to. Which was a good question come to think. Because if he wasn’t lost, he was damn near to it.
He had left the map with his clothes, but it was a simple thing and he knew what it showed, and had discovered what it didn’t. The stream had forked once or twice as other creeks and streamlines joined it. Probably he should have gone west – or east. He had kept going uphill which he reckoned was still north. But he had no real way of knowing.
That old saying about moss growing on the north side of trees didn’t apply to the Pacific Northwest where the trees were mossy on all sides, from as high as the deer could not reach to where the branches thickened up. Now that the sun was higher, he had to decide if he should keep heading north, or backtrack and try heading east or west. Uphill was a given. He hadn’t found Heather and the cabins had petered out some miles ago,
He decided he’d probably come far enough, but that it was probably better to keep following the river a little further to be certain. He waded, swam and clambered up the increasingly steep riverbed. The sun had cleared the tops of the trees before he decided that he should retrace his steps.
At least going back down was faster. And if he stood on his hind legs, and he did, he had a new perspective on the hillsides. He saw that he had missed a cabin or six. He had to check those out. None of them had inhabitants. None of them held his wife.
Other than keep doggedly plodding along until he found her, he didn’t see that he had much of a plan. It was going to be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Heather was going to starve to death before he located her.
He began to hope that those feral Duprés would return for her. Didn’t matter about him – sooner or later he would make it back to civilization – but Heather was in a delicate condition and a couple of days in the woods would only make her frailer.
He found what he what he eventually decided had to be the Benoit camp when he went west. It wasn’t much to look at, but it sprawled in a clearing like it had grown there. There was moss on the cedar shingled roof but no holes. It had been built of weathered gray logs over a period of years. He sniffed around, he caught the scent of Uncle Pierre, of Lenny, and of Zeke. But there was no fresh scent. And no sign of his wife. He padded back to the river and headed downstream once more.
He had just about given up hope when he found a spot on the riverbank that smelled like his mate. There was a fish trap in the river full of steelhead and minnows. The blackberry bushes had been recently picked by his wife. He hoped this meant Heather was okay. His nose tracked her back through the trees to a tidy little house nestled in a pretty glade. A pair of jeans, a shirt and socks were drying on one of the trees.
Although the windows were open, the doors were shut. There was one off the front porch, and one that led out from a lean-to. He peered in the windows. Someone was curled up under a purple blanket fast asleep.
He poked his head in through the open window and sniffed. It was his Heather all right. He whuffed. She didn’t stir. What would she do if he was a real bear? She wasn’t fit to be left alone. He returned to the front porch. Would it hold his weight? Why risk it?
He hunkered down by the steps to wait for her to awaken. He could trust himself to rouse if a vehicle made it up the dirt road or if Heather started moving around. He let his eyes close. The song of a lovesick robin followed him down into his dreams.
CHAPTER TWELVE
She couldn’t believe she had fallen asleep in the middle of the day. But she felt great. Better even than she had felt that morning after her good night’s sleep. She obviously had some catching up to do. After all she was sleeping for four. Surely her jeans would be dry by now? She padded off to the lean-to, because after all she was also peeing for four.
As soon as she opened the front door she saw him. A big male black. She knew it was Patrick right away. Although she could not have said why. He looked larger than she had remembered him being. Blacker. More muscular. Huh.
His fur looked a little bedraggled. As if he’d gone swimming and then not known how to groom himself properly. Could she get around him and get to her jeans before he woke up? His round ears were swiveling like radio receptors and his eyes opened while she was still dithering on the porch in her panties and bra. He yawned and made a mating whine. Before her eyes he began to take human. She retreated into the cabin and snatched up the blanket she had left behind.
He stalked into the house stark naked. She hadn’t remembered him having so much hair. On his chest. On his belly. On his legs and arms. And there. There where his dick was a fully armed missile threatening her. Taking bear seemed to have turned him from a hairless boy into a proper man. She pulled the blanket more tightly around herself.
“Are you okay?” he growled.
She nodded. “Where are your clothes?”
“I had to leave them downstream. Do you have a towel or something?” But he didn’t look like he wanted a something. He looked like he wanted her. His big hard face was grim, but his mouth was soft and sensual.
“There may be something in one of the closets.”
“Or I could have one of the sheets behind you.” He pointed. This time he used his finger.
She handed him one of her precious sheets. And watched as he wrapped it around himself. He did his best, but he still looked very happy to see her.
“I’m just going to go see if my clothes are dry.” She tried to push past him to get to the door.
But he snagged her arm and pulled her against his chest. “Are you okay?”
“Better than okay.” Why was her voice so husky and sensual?
His mouth crashed down on hers, needy and demanding. He kissed her as if he was returning from combat to his faithful mate. And she kissed him back as if he was her returning warrior. When he broke the clinch, her breath was coming hard and he was panting as hard as she was. Red bars marked his broad high cheekbones that were so like his brother’s. So like her cousins’.
“On my wedding night.”
He stroked her cheek. “I’m sorry. I took so long to get here. Your cousins gave me a map, but it didn’t make a lot of sense to a stranger. I wasted a lot of time looking in empty cabins.”
She couldn’t help it. She giggled. “These woods are full of hunting camps.”
“I found that out.” He kissed her again. Less fiercely this time. But with just the same amount of neediness.
Her blanket undid itself and slipped to the floor. His sheet joined it. What the heck. They were married. She was already pregnant. Wasn’t she entitled to a little happiness once in a while? And he was certainly equipped to make her very happy indeed.
“What are you giggling about?” he whispered as he carried her to the bed.
It was nothing like that episode by the river that she had dreamed about so often. He laid her down reverently and stroked her as if she were precious. He tussled a little with her old bra until he got it off. And then he palmed her breasts and weighed them carefully as if they belonged to him. He kissed the tips reverently. Deliciously. And then he tasted the undersides and left little nibbling kisses as he nuzzled his way along the lower curves and back to her nipples.
She stroked his chest. The black curls that had sprouted there were tangled and silky. His flat brown discs were puckered as tightly as her own nipples. She wanted to lick and suck as he was licking and sucking hers, but she didn’t have the right angle. Hmm. This wasn’t something you could do in tandem. Not from this position. She contented herself with petting him all the way down his furry six-pack to his navel and then daringly beyond to where his dick was long and thick and dripping.
As suddenly as he had shown up on her doorstep, he abandoned her tingling breasts and lifted her by her butt, discovered her panties, and had them dangling from one foot. Before she could squeak he was inspecting her sex. Let him look. She spread her thighs and squirmed a little closer to him.
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